From FS Magazine, Hadley Stewart: "Despite having consented to sex, we don’t necessarily make it clear what we’re consenting to. How able do you feel to negotiate in the bedroom?"

If, like me, you’ve never sat down and thought about the term ‘consent’, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it doesn’t really apply to you.
Often we associate the term with the law, meaning that it’s easy to think it’s something that doesn’t form part of our lives unless we’ve been the victim of a crime. A sexual assault, for instance, is often paired up with the notion of consent. So does that mean we’ve never consented to anything or used our power of consent? Probably

From FS Magazine, Mark Reed on gay-straight socializing: "Maybe if we tried to integrate more, we could break down prejudices held on both sides."

I have straight male friends who I hang out with one on one, but I don’t have groups of straight male pals who I hang out with on a regular basis. I don’t consciously seek to avoid these kinds of social situations, it’s more because, by and large, I feel more comfortable in the company of gay men (more on that later). This was going to be an all-straight affair, and I didn’t know half of the group at all.I was recently invited on a stag do – a first for me. I signed up quite readily,

From FS Magazine, Matthew Hodson: " Let’s talk about STIs when we need to talk about STIs but let’s keep our eye on the prize of ending HIV."

Let’s talk about PrEP. Or, let’s talk about how HIV treatment prevents the virus being passed on to sexual partners. When our virus is undetectable it is untransmittable (U=U).
How long do we go down either conversational road before someone starts talking about STIs? I was told by someone who works for an HIV support organisation that we shouldn’t let HIV-positive people with an undetectable viral load know that they aren’t a risk to sexual partners. “If you do that,” I was t

From FS Magazine, Ruaidhri O'Baoill tells of "a time when I should have protected myself more than ever but instead put myself through continuous sexual risk" and how he found his way forward.

When I was diagnosed as HIV-positive I turned to sex as a way to cope with how I was feeling about myself.
I lost all confidence and self-condemned myself to the ‘unwanted’ pile. I relied on the quick fix that sex brought to make myself feel better again.
It was the connection, contact and ultimately acceptance, along with being desired, that I craved which sex provided me with – no matter the circumstance. I didn’t set out to intentionally put myself at risk again after being d

From FS Magazine, this report on the rise of drug-resistant STI.

In the last couple of months we’ve seen headlines about three (yes, three) untreatable infections of super gonorrhoea.
The World Health Organization has called it a “very serious situation”, but how does a bacterial STI become untreatable, and what can we do to stop it?
What already works?
Antibiotics are medicines used to treat bacterial infections, in both humans and animals. Different antibiotics work in different ways, some stop the bacteria from forming the right cell structure,